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WILKES-BARRE - Pop quiz. Now that the Wilkes-Barre/Scranton Penguins have reached the midway point of the season, who's their leading scorer?

It's not Beau Bennett, the highly skilled rookie who will be the team's lone representative in the AHL All-Star Game.

It's not Eric Tangradi, who is skating on a line with Evgeni Malkin and James Neal these days and seems to have graduated to Pittsburgh for good.

It's not Trevor Smith, who has hit the 20-goal mark in each of his five previous AHL seasons.

It's Riley Holzapfel, the versatile, under-the-radar forward who could easily be considered the team's MVP through 39 games.

"Not only our first-half MVP, but you could arguably say he was our first-half most improved player," coach John Hynes said. "He's a guy who dropped 3 percent body fat since he got here. His skating test time really improved from the start of the year to when we just tested it. â¦ His pace of play, his speed, his shot - all those things are starting to come to fruition because he's in better shape and has really improved his game."

Holzapfel, who is one of two players on the roster to appear in all 39 games, has 11 goals and 14 assists for a team-leading 25 points. The most recent of those 11 goals was a particularly memorable one. He took a pass from Zach Sill, skated up the left wing and blasted a shot past Dany Sabourin to tie the score, 1-1, in the third period of Sunday's AHL Outdoor Classic in Hershey. The Penguins went on to win, 2-1, in overtime.

There were a couple of reasons Holzapfel took the shot rather than trying to find an open teammate. First, the ice conditions weren't conducive to passing. Second, and just as importantly, during a trip to Pittsburgh for an intrasquad scrimmage last week, the parent club's coaching staff was encouraging Holzapfel to shoot more.

"I've been told my whole life I have a good shot and sometimes I look to pass to my linemates instead of shooting," Holzapfel said. "Hynsie has been helping me, trying to work on it and have that shot-first mentality. Going into the outdoor game, I told my linemates I was going to shoot every chance I got just because of the circumstances and the ice. I just kept shooting and shooting and got that good one."

Leading a team in scoring isn't a new experience for Holzapfel. The season after he was Atlanta's second-round pick in the 2006 draft, he led the Moose Jaw Warriors of the Western Hockey League with 39 goals and 82 points.

For most of his professional career, however, he's been used in a checking-line role.

"We knew he had the potential to score," Hynes said. "When we signed him, what we felt about him as an organization was he was kind of an untapped guy. He had a really good junior career. Don Waddell, who is on our scouting staff, was the GM in Atlanta and drafted him high in the draft. He knew about his skill set and things like that."

As it turns out, even though Holzapfel always thought of himself as a top-six forward, his time in the bottom six has helped him become the player he is today. He isn't just a top-line scoring winger for the Penguins. He can comfortably and effectively play literally any of the 12 forward spots in the lineup or in any special-teams situation.

And now, that learning process has the 24-year-old Holzapfel closer to the NHL than he's ever been before.

"I'd like to think so," Holzapfel said. "I've never had the opportunity to play in a regular-season NHL game and get that call-up. It's something I've been working towards. Hopefully one day it will come true. It would be a great honor to be able to play my first game with Pittsburgh."

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